This is one of the most inauspicious moments in history to release an adamantly apolitical film centered on reproductive choices. Wanuri Kahiu’s Look Both Ways in other contexts might simply be a fairly inoffensive feel-good romance riff. As it is, though, the film’s lack of courage is painful and unforgivable.
Did you know? The Reader is nonprofit. The Reader is member supported. You can help keep the Reader free for everyone—and get exclusive rewards—when you become a member. The Reader Revolution membership program is a sustainable way for you to support local, independent media.
The movie’s high concept is that it follows two possible versions of the life of its main character Natalie (Lili Reinhart). Natalie is a graduating senior at the University of Texas at Austin with great plans to become an animator. In a celebratory moment, she sleeps with her best friend Gabe (Danny Ramirez). Shortly thereafter, she feels sick and takes a pregnancy test. In one world, the test is negative, and she whooshes off to LA. In the other, the test is positive, and she has to move back to her parents’ home to have the baby.
The film does very briefly acknowledge that Natalie could have had an abortion in theory. In practice, though, it treats terminating a pregnancy as unthinkable and unimaginable. The movie would be much stronger, and make much more sense thematically and structurally, if Natalie had been pregnant in both realities, and had chosen not to have a child, rather than just avoiding it by chance. Instead, when Natalie becomes pregnant, she has only one choice.
The bulk of the movie is meant to illustrate that you can find love and career success and happiness whichever way your life goes. Given Texas’s brutal new post-Dobbs abortion restrictions, that ends up feeling like a glib justification. Women who have unplanned pregnancies, the film insists, will be just as happy with a baby as they’d be otherwise. They need to trust fate and choose whichever life it hands them. Look Both Ways claims it’s offering women many options. But it feels more like it’s closing them down. TV-14, 110 min. Netflix
